Chapter 1 #2
Ezra made his way to the building’s main doors.
Locked! Of course. He’d encountered this problem before, but the night watchman who usually pulled the skeleton keys from his belt was nowhere to be seen.
Making the rounds with his torch, probably.
Ezra wondered whether he should wait. The only alternative was to go searching.
He didn’t particularly relish the thought.
There was something haunting about this place…
something about the way everything was entombed in glass.
For protection, the museum curators claimed.
Ezra wasn’t so sure. On the surface, he knew they meant well.
But there was so much that didn’t make the information plaques accompanying each piece.
The scarabs of his youth—so stony, so still—sat beneath perfect lighting and etched labels.
Reduced to specimens. Every time Ezra passed their case, his throat tightened.
Something felt trapped.
And not just the relics.
These feelings grew even worse with the statues of the pharaohs.
There was no glass around them, no, but both Ramesses II and Amenhotep III looked lost. Their granite bodies had been brutalized by hammers, wrenched from their temples by the order of British diplomats and sailed across a strange sea.
Ezra couldn’t help drawing comparisons, when he stood in these kings’ shadows.
How he too had made that voyage, as a scant six-year-old aboard the HMS Euphemia.
More than once he’d vomited the contents of his stomach over the ship’s rails while Lord Blackwood patted him on the back and offered him sips of some special tea.
As if that could soften the blow of being taken.
Thomas Ellington hadn’t used a chisel to remove Ezra from Egypt.
But still, something inside him had cracked.
Small, precise fractures.
Little pieces lost.
He never quite fit with his surroundings.
He was not an Ellington, though he lived in their house.
Fellow students at Oxford were constantly trying to greet him in Italian or Greek, guessing thanks to a complexion that wasn’t quite white or brown enough to anchor Ezra to either side of his parentage.
Even this museum was a cruel reminder that his Egyptian-ness was allowed here only as a relic.
Something to be cataloged and gaped at. Ezra hated being gaped at.
So he’d gotten good at putting up his own glass walls: smiling through Professor Blythe’s judgmental lectures and flappers who complimented him on his command of English.
For protection.
But the cracks still appeared, sometimes.
BANG!
Every muscle in Ezra’s body seized as he looked around the entry hall. His hand moved to the Webley pistol he’d kept tucked in the back of his waistband since France. (Habits from hell die hard.)
The sound wasn’t a gunshot, though. It sounded as if a brass sign had gotten knocked over onto the museum floor. That wouldn’t have been the night watchman, Ezra thought, the hairs on the back of his neck bristling. Nor did he suppose it was a twenty-ton granite pharaoh.
A thief, then?
Ezra kept his pistol drawn, aimed at the floor, as he scanned the dark galleries.
Adrenaline sang through his veins, bringing the rooms into sharper relief.
Molded white ceilings and glass cases refracted the moonlight.
Two massive, winged lions from Assyria flanked the hall.
Beyond them, columns ribbed out into the Egyptian gallery.
He heard whispers rising from the ancient stones, so soft that for a moment he wondered if it wasn’t the statues themselves.
The hairs on the back of his neck felt electric.
His finger was a feather against the trigger.
“Shhhhhh!”
“I don’t think you’re supposed to be touching those, Minnie!” This next whisper was soft—feminine. “What if you get cursed?”
A giggle echoed through the gallery. “Curses aren’t real!”
“That’s exactly what someone who was about to get cursed would say! Haven’t you read The Adventure of the Egyptian Tomb?”
“That’s fiction, Rose. It means the author made it all up!”
“What about Lord Carnarvon? Hm? He was real enough, and look at what happened to him after he opened King Tut’s tomb! He dropped dead of a mosquito bite.”
“Yes, a mosquito bite,” Minnie replied dryly. “Not a vengeful mummy’s curse.”
“King Tut could have cursed the mosquito!”
“I think you’ve been listening to too many of Hugo Pratt’s stories. He’s pulling your leg, Rose.”
A third voice broke in. “Would you two be quiet? I’m trying to concentrate on these hieroglyphics.”
Ezra crept deeper into the Egyptian gallery.
He paused by good ole Ramesses II and peered around the display to see several young women by a stone sarcophagus.
His first thought, when he saw them, was not thieves, but birds.
Each wore an outfit assembled with an outrageous number of feathers.
A slender brunette leaned against the coffin with an unlit cigarette dangling from her lips—covered in peacock plumage.
Minnie. This was according to Rose, who was dressed in flamingo pink and continuing to chastise her friend by name.
On the far side of the gallery stood a young woman dressed in striking black feathers, which had been arranged with wires to resemble a pair of wings.
Ezra might have moved to study them more closely, if not for the fourth intruder.
She was crouched by the sarcophagus with a magnifying glass held up to her eye. Her dress was covered in white feathers, lending her neck a swanny look as she craned close to examine the symbols etched on the dark stone. Very few men in the world could read hieroglyphics. And even fewer women…
It was her.
Impossibly her.
There were over seven million people in this seething mass of a city, and Ezra had stumbled straight into the one person he’d gone to great lengths to avoid. This absurdity tugged a small laugh out of him.
On the coffin, Minnie straightened. The cigarette in her mouth went limp. “What was that?”
“The curse!” Rose’s arms flapped wildly, swatting Minnie from the sarcophagus. “Get off before you wake up the rest of the gallery’s mummies, Minnie!”
“There are no mummies in this room,” Ezra said as he stepped out from behind the pillar. “They’re on the second floor, and their knees would crumble to dust if they tried taking the stairs. You’re quite safe!”
He realized, too late, that he was holding a gun as he said this.
Minnie let out a scream.
Her cigarette tumbled to the floor. Rose dove there too—ducking behind the coffin.
The young woman wearing the white feathers looked up at this commotion, still holding her magnifying glass to her eye.
Its glass warped her round face. There was so much there that Ezra did not recognize.
Lipstick, for one thing. Makeup had been caked over her freckles, and her long blond hair had been cut to match the drastic line of her jaw.
This style made her look far older, though that also could’ve been due to the eight years that had passed since they’d crossed paths.
“Ezra?” A green eye blinked. The magnifying glass lowered, so he could see every spectrum of emotion on her face. The joy, the disbelief, the hurt. “Is that—Is it really you?”
He wondered if he should have stayed behind the column.
But it was too late now.
“Hello, Biz.” This was a pet name, from their childhood. Ezra wasn’t sure it still matched the young woman in front of him. “Or do you go by Elizabeth now?”
“Only in the daily papers,” she replied with a half-hearted curtsy. “What in the world are you doing here?”
“I could ask the same of you.” Apart from the ungodly hour, the women weren’t exactly dressed for a museum promenade. Now that Biz had turned, he could see that there was a splat of mud dripping down the side of her shift.
Biz followed his stare and scowled at the dirt. “Damn! I just had this dress done… If you must know, my friends and I are on a treasure hunt—”
“I’m sorry, Biz.” The explanation was cut off by Rose, who’d peeked back out from behind the sarcophagus. “But do you mean to say you know the mad gentleman who’s wielding a gun at us?”
“I’m not mad,” Ezra said, a little too sharply. His voice cracked at the last word. Something cold coiled down his spine as he switched on the safety and returned the weapon to his waistband.
“Neither would I call Ezra Bright a gentleman,” Biz said, in that teasing way of hers.
“He is, however, many other things. A scholar. An adventurer. A war hero. Do you know, he used to help us hunt treasure back at Thornhill? He was usually the first to solve Father’s riddles, but he always made George and me think the clues through to the end. It was infuriating!”
George. This name was a punch to the gut.
The cold feeling kept throttling Ezra’s spine.
He could feel the weight of the pharaoh above him—and even though he knew there was no threat that the statue would come crashing down, Ezra still wanted to run.
I shouldn’t be here. George. George should have survived instead.
But there was no going back, not to the war, not to Thornhill, not to those sand-strewn lullabies of his childhood.
Ezra shifted his satchel of books on his shoulder. “Did Lord Blackwood send you here?” he asked.
Biz brushed more dirt from her dress. “No,” she said. “Haven’t you been reading the papers?”
“Treasure hunts are all the rage with the Bright Young Things these days!” Minnie explained, twirling that demolished cigarette between her fingers. “We follow clues all over London! The press loves it! Especially when we end up racing cars or climbing Cleopatra’s Needle!”
“Or breaking into museums?” Ezra couldn’t help but add.
“Nothing was broken,” Biz answered breezily, holding up a familiar set of keys. “I simply bribed Walter to grant us access.”